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Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. Vitaly is writer, speaker, author and editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine. He runs front-end/UX workshops, webinars and loves solving complex UX, front-end and performance problems in large companies. Get in touch.

So you find yourself somewhere in a little tourist station in Northern Sweden — with a few adventurous tourists, 86 surprisingly happy inhabitants, and a remarkably good Internet connection. There is nothing but breathtaking nature around you, with blueish mountains and bright red skyline blurring endless horizon — and Northern Lights dancing in the sky right above you. What do you do? Obviously, you come up with an idea for those sneaky 'lil Smashing Mystery riddles.

In our previous riddles, we turned our little challenges into quests for creative solutions quickly. However, as we try to level up every new Mystery to keep it quite difficult to solve, with a new riddle this time we decided to turn it into an exercise of patience and stubbornness — beyond problem solving, of course.

You didn't really think we'd wrap up our endless, mischievousmysteryriddles just like that, did you? Well, the Mystery continues! To celebrate the launch of the SmashingConf NYC 2015, we’ve prepared a new mystery riddle, and this one will be an exercise in patience and stubborness. No, it's not going to be an easy one this time either, but the reward is definitely worth the effort.

How does it work? Well, you know how it works. Below you’ll find the first of a few animated GIFs that contain a hidden Twitter hashtag. Your job is to discover those hashtags as fast as possible. If your guess for a hashtag is right, you’ll find a tweet leading you to the next level. Once you’ve reached the last level, just tweet out all the hints in one single tweet to @smashingmag. You're looking for 5 hashtags in total, a hashtag per level. Not that difficult, right?

Mobile is a difficult, unpredictable beast. If you run into technical problems in mobile, then you’ll know how annoying fixing them can be. That’s why we’ve teamed up with Peter-Paul Koch to create The Mobile Web Handbook, our practical new guide to dealing with front-end challenges in mobile. The book is finally ready and is now shipping worldwide. It’s available in print or as an eBook.

We have all been there. Whether you are developing a responsive website or an app or just dealing with WebViews, you always end up running into annoying technical problems that all of those quirky (and not so quirky) mobile browsers throw up so very often. Weird browser bugs, inconsistent CSS and JavaScript support, performance issues, mobile fragmentation and complicated nuances such as device pixels, viewports, zooming, touch event cascade, pointer and click events and the 300-millisecond delay. No, mobile isn’t actually dark matter, but it does require you to learn a few new things, some of which are quite confusing.

Today Smashing Magazine turns eight years old. Eight years is a long time on the web, yet for us it really doesn't feel like a long journey at all. Things have changed, evolved and moved on, and we gratefully take on new challenges one at a time. To mark this special little day, we’d love to share a few things that we’ve learned over the last year about the performance challenges of this very website and about the work we’ve done recently. If you want to craft a fast responsive website, you might find a few interesting nuggets worth considering. – Ed.

Improvement is a matter of steady, ongoing iteration. When we redesigned Smashing Magazine back in 2012, our main goal was to establish trustworthy branding that would reflect the ambitious editorial direction of the magazine. We did that primarily by focusing on crafting a delightful reading experience. Over the years, our focus hasn't changed a bit; however, that very asset that helped to establish our branding turned into a major performance bottleneck.

You've seen this happen a thousand times. An organization struggles with a high level of internal enthusiasm and creative chaos that team leaders don't know how to handle any more. To bring order into projects, a new product manager is appointed, under huge expectation, and with unclear responsibilities and big goals defined within a very short timeframe. That's when things usually go south, resulting in failed projects, crushed teams and disappointed clients.

That's why we've teamed up with our author and friend Rian van der Merwe, a senior product manager with a sociology and UX background, to create a new practical book to help product managers in the digital space manage projects effectively — the right way, with the right strategy, in the right time, with the right team. Making It Right is a book about just that: what product management is, what it isn't, why it's important, and how to approach it strategically and meaningfully to get things done well. Available today.

Experiments and side projects are wonderful ways to challenge yourself and explore areas that you wouldn't usually consider exploring. That's what Smashing Mystery Riddles are for us: little experiments that challenge us to come up with something new, original and a bit crazy—every single time. The ideas are usually a synthesis of the things we discover, stumble upon or try out ourselves—and oh my, they take quite some time to get right.

The most recent riddle took quite a lot of time spent fiddling and getting right (and Guillaume, the designer, wasn't that happy about all the changes that our tests required). The basic idea was simple: as usual, you have a series of animated GIFs containing clues. One animated GIF leads to another, and every animated GIF contains a key (or keys) that have to be discovered. Once you uncover all the keys, you construct a solution and send out a tweet containing that solution. Doesn't sound too difficult, does it?

Ah, these mysteryriddlesnever stop, do they? To celebrate the launch of the SmashingConf Whistler, our very first conference in Canada, we’ve prepared a yet another riddle, and of course this time it's not going to be any easier!

Tip: Watch out for a hint in one of the frames in each of the GIFs. Large view.

So, how does it work this time? Well, below you'll find the first of a few hidden animated GIFs that contain a secret Twitter hashtag. Your job is to deconstruct that hashtag as fast as possible. To do that, you have to pay attention to the file name and count objects within the GIF (for example, "3 chairs") and search for them on Twitter (i.e. #3chairs).

Argh! Weird browser bugs, inconsistent CSS/JavaScript support, performance issues, mobile fragmentation and complicated nuances such as device pixels, viewports, zooming, touch event cascade, pointer/click events and the 300ms delay. To make sense of it all, we created The Mobile Web Handbook, a new practical book by Peter-Paul Koch to help you understand technical issues on mobile and deal with them effectively.

We have all been there. With Responsive Web Design becoming a convenient strategy for device-agnostic design, we keep running into annoying technical issues that all those quirky (and not so quirky) mobile browsers are raising so very often. However, fixing these issues can be quite easy — once you understand exactly why they come up. The book will be useful for mobile strategists, developers, designers, and everybody willing to better understand the intricacies of mobile — both technical and market-related.

We’ve all been there, haven’t we? You find yourself in a coffee shop abroad, sipping cappuccino and chomping a muffin as you realize that your laptop’s battery charge is just about to crush your creative session to dust. Well, perhaps you’ve got your power adapter with you but, of course, it isn’t the right one for foreign power sockets.

So you end up looking around and chatting up with strangers asking for help. Some are more responsive than others, and before you know it, you don’t just have a full battery, but you've made a couple of new, surprisingly interesting acquaintances.

By now, you might actually know how it works. The good ol' Smashing Mysteries: the door that would never open and the rain that would never stop. Well, the Mystery continues! To celebrate the launch of Paul Boag's Digital Adaptation book, we’ve prepared a new riddle, and this time it's a bit different and a bit easier.

How does it work? Below you'll find three animated GIFs that contain a hidden message. Each GIF contains a few scattered letters (all uppercase) that you can use to build words. Once you put the words from all the GIFs together, you will be able to create a sentence. Please notice that no letters should be left unused. Once you've resolved the mystery, please tweet the full sentence using the hashtag #smashing.

When I started developing websites back in the day, I was lucky to have hundreds of valuable, practical articles that would help me become better at what I did. I could learn day and night, and whenever I discovered a new tool or technique, I would bookmark it on Delicious for future reference. I knew the value of each article and of each bookmark, and I kept revisiting and carefully tagging them for months and months — almost every day.

Years have passed. The landscape has changed. Blogs have emerged and new publications have appeared. Some magazines were discontinued yet remained fully available online (Pingmag and good ol' Digital-Web, for example). At that point, maintaining a backup of online articles obviously didn't even cross my mind. For a year or so, I even stopped bookmarking articles since I could always find them via Google, of course. I was naive and stupid.

Today is the day when it all started — the day when this little website launched back in 2006. Today, we celebrate our seventh anniversary, and you, dear readers, are the ones who have made it possible and kept us going.

A couple of months ago, I was on a night train on my way to one of those countless Web design conferences. Being offline with a ridiculous roaming rate is always a good excuse to get some work done, and the music streaming from my good ol’ headphones helped me to focus on the draft of the chapter I was reviewing for our upcoming book.

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As designing static pages has become untenable, many have started to approach design in a modular way.
In this book, we’ll identify what makes an effective design system that empowers teams to
create great digital products.
Pre-order the book now →

Today, too many websites are still inaccessible. In our new book
Inclusive Design Patterns, we explore how to craft
flexible front-end design patterns and make future-proof and accessible interfaces without extra effort. Hardcover, 312 pages.
Get the book →

Meet the new Sketch Handbook, our brand
new Smashing book that will help you master all the tricky, advanced facets of Sketch. Filled with
practical examples and tutorials in 12 chapters, the book will help you become more proficient in your work.
Get the book.

Trends don’t matter, but techniques do.
With SmashingConf Barcelona, we’ll explore problems,
smart solutions and lessons learned from actual projects.
Taking place on October 17–18 at the Palau de la Música Catalana.
To the tickets →

Home sweet home! On September 11–12th, we're gathering for our 6thSmashingConf Freiburg right next to the legendary Black Forest.
With Umar Hansa, Rachel Andrew, Alla Kholmatova, Chris Wright, and others.
To the tickets →